David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)

Everything Is Green

She says I do not care if you believe me or not, it is the truth, go on and believe what you want to.
So it is for sure that she is lying, when it is the truth she will go crazy trying to get you to believe her. So I
feel like I know.

She lights up and looks off away from me, looking sly with her cigarette in light through a wet
window, and I can not feel what to say.

I say Mayfly I can not feel what to do or say or believe you any more. But there is things I know. I
know I am older and you are not. And I give to you all I got to give you, with my hands and my heart
both. Every thing that is inside me I have gave you. I have been keeping it together and working steady
every day. I have made you the reason I got for what I always do. I have tried to make a home to give to
you, for you to be in, and for it to be nice.

I light up myself then I throw the match in the sink with other matches and dishes and a sponge
and such things.

I say Mayfly my heart has been down the road and back for you but I am forty-eight years old. It is
time I have got to not let things just carry me by any more. I got to use some time that is still mine to try
to make every thing feel right. I got to try to feel how I need to. In me there is needs which you can not
even see any more, because there is too many needs in you in the way.

She does not say any thing and I look at her window and I can feel that she knows I know about it,
and she shifts her self on my sofa lounger. She brings her legs up underneath her in some shorts.

I say it really does not matter what I seen or what I think I seen. That is not it any more. I know I
am older and you are not. But now I am feeling like there is all of me going out to you and nothing of you
coming back any more.

Her hair is up with a barret and pins and her chin is in her hand, it’s early, she looks like she is
dreaming out at the clean light through the wet window over my sofa lounger.

Every thing is green she says. Look how green it all is Mitch. How can you say the things you say
you feel like when every thing outside is green like it is.

The window over the sink of my kitchenet is cleaned off from the hard rain last night, and it is a
morning with sun, it is still early, and there is a mess of green out. The trees are green and some grass out
past the speed bumps is green and slicked down. But every thing is not green. The other trailers are not
green, and my card table out with puddles in lines and beer cans and butts floating in the ash trays is not
green, or my truck, or the gravel of the lot, or the big wheel toy that is on its side under a clothes line
without no clothes on it by the next trailer, where the guy has got him some kids.

Every thing is green she is saying. She is whispering it and the whisper is not to me no more I
know.

I chuck my smoke and turn hard from the morning outside with the taste of something true in my
mouth. I turn hard toward her in the light on the sofa lounger.

She is looking outside, from where she is sitting, and I look at her, and there is something in me
that can not close up, in that looking. Mayfly has a body. And she is my morning. Say her name.